Recently, developments of environment-conscious products such as an energy-saving design for reducing carbon dioxide output which is a global warming substance and a recycling-oriented design for promoting effective utilization of resource are becoming increasingly important.
Under such circumstances, a life cycle assessment (LCA) is noted as a method of quantitatively assessing an environmental load from raw material procurements to a disposal of a product and reflecting the environmental load on product designs for the purpose of reducing the environmental load. The environmental load is a quantified value of influences that an activity of an object of assessment exerts either directly or indirectly on the global environment (global atmosphere, hydrosphere, soil, etc.), and various items such as outputs of CO2, NOx and SOx to the atmosphere, energy consumption, degree of influence on global warming are used for the evaluation.
In order to carry out the LCA of a product, it is necessary to understand an environmental load from a raw material procurement to a production of each of the components constituting the product. In order to find out an environmental load of each of the components, it is necessary to investigate quantities of substances as well as input and output of energy used for producing the component. Further, an activity for propelling the developments of environment-conscious products is beginning to start, by so using the environmental load as one of decision-making inducers as to support a decision about a purchase of a component among a plurality of candidate components to thereby use components each of which has a low environmental load for a product.
However, since various substances are inputted for the production of components, it is not easy to correctly understand relevant processes and, therefore, it has been difficult to propel the reduction in the loads to be applied on the earth resources and the global environment.
To be more specific, at a component production site, a plurality of components are produced at one time in many cases and, especially, it is difficult to find out information relating to each of the components such as an amount of used treatment agent which does not remain on the component and energy consumption.
Further, much labor is required for assessing an environmental load of a product which consists of many components since environmental loads of the respective components must be investigated for the assessment.
Furthermore, in the case of using the environmental load as one of the decision-making inducers for supporting decision about a purchase of a component among a plurality of candidate components, it is difficult for a component purchaser to obtain information of the environmental load of the component since maintenance of data for environmental loads of components to be sold is not sufficient at component sellers. Moreover, since it is difficult for each of the component sellers to find out a level of environmental load of the component that they sell with respect to those sold by competitor component sellers, the component sellers have difficulty in defining an object value and so forth for further reducing the environmental load.